So you see in the machines are two times. One is craft time and the other is output time. Combined together is the total cycle time of the machine. The other term I use is WIP which stands for "work in progress" I mention this at the start for when I use the term "cycle time and WIP" below as it's not spelled out in the game. Also, I refer to production cells a lot. This is because production cells can have economy of volume where very large intricate production lines achieve the same thing but at much higher cost in maintenance, utilities, and available square footage.

First rule of manufacturing: parts that aren't moving have no value and only add to costs.
Second rule of manufacturing: Achieve maximum output of quality product at minimum cost.

• If you have semi-complete parts building up in a machine you are losing value on your WIP. The only place you should have a build up of parts, if anyplace, should be in the very last machine on the line a boxing machine. But if you are backing up boxes in a machine you need to add capacity to your boxing operations. Your market orders will activate based on raw stock on hand not on whether or not you have 10k pieces tied up in a machine. So it's important to keep your buy orders small as you set up a line and tune it, don't worry the market in the game right now does not run out of material so there is always stock to be purchased though the price may fluctuate.

• The end of line boxing machine is not being counted in this. It takes 20 complete items and outputs 1 box, I will talk about them a bit further on.

• Look at cost of materials and machine consumption before you set that first buy order, I managed to gain the bankruptcy achievement on my first ammunition line because I duplicated the cloth order changed it to brass and hit save. However with my clothing lines running at such high volumes I had set the number for cloth pretty high. Brass costs a LOT more than cloth. The order executed and bankrupt me because I had the orders set to work even if I was running in the negative values. So yay for the achievement i guess but it was very much a, "What did i just do?!", moment.

• Lines designed for maximum output will need dedicated production cells for some items like gun components. 2 items needed to make firearms Metal bars and metal rods so instead of having one or two metal formers feeding several mills you can set up a dedicated production cell to just produce metal bars, in this way that cell area can be scaled to feed more and more firearm lines and let's you construct your lines differently as the dispensers, formers, and hammer forges are moved to another area and won't need to be considered in laying out a new line. You still have to figure out how to get the material to the new line but if you have enough output capacity built in to the cell it ends up being a lot easier to move material than find floor space.

• Craft time is the time it takes to make the item/s and output time is how long it takes the machine to release 1 item. So even though you may craft 6 gun components in say 2 seconds from a metal bar the output time you see on the mill is for 1 of the 6 crafted components not all 6. This is true for any machine whether it puts out 1 part per cycle or 6.

• If you are going to try for maximum output then you only need to set all the machines on the line to their minimum craft time and output speeds and look for the bottlenecks which are machines that have long cycle times. No matter how much material you feed into the line, the minimum cycle time on the slowest machine on the line is the maximum output you can achieve unless you add more machines depending on what you're making. So if the bottleneck is a cycle time of 3.5 seconds you can add another machine at max speed and split the inputs between both and achieve an average 1.75 seconds of cycle time.

• So now you have choices to make do you set all the cycle times to match your bottle neck or do you add machines to overcome the problem? Every machine, conveyor, and utility requires maintenance costs and everything except the utility connections themselves use gas/water/electric.

• The more machines the more you have to consider how the mechanics will get to them to service them. Mechanics require a space 1 meter wide to walk down. 1 square on the floor is 1m. The exception i have found to this is at the bottom of stairs in some tight areas, you have to leave enough of the machine exposed for the mechanic to get to but I'm currently having a hard time determining how much machine has to be exposed. I've had instances where a mechanic gets to the bottom of the stairs but can't turn to work on the machine and another instance where the mechanic was standing on the second to bottom stair and was able to work on the machine. So make sure to watch the stairs when you use them in tight spaces so you can see if the mechanics can actually work on them.

You now "draw out your conveyor lines in the game but they still have costs. I will have to start playing with this again to see how things have changed.

• Conveyors all have cost whether they are attached to a line or not so don't leave any laying around that aren't being used. The more conveyors you have the more it costs, and it takes longer to move materials between machines so you are adding to WIP by having large conveyor systems, but in some spots you may have no choice.

• Avoid feeding small parts onto a seam between two conveyors whenever possible. Use those small angled conveyors to help prevent spillage, truth be told use those conveyors on small parts whenever possible to minimize spillage on the floor. Small parts hate seams. The downside is you can't feed angled conveyors from the side except from above. AND, since the seams are where the legs are you can't place a recycle bin where the parts are actually falling through, and you can't hire a janitor to clean either.

• Are you having issues with materials bulldozing each other when you have multiple feed points on a single conveyor? Look Up. The smaller raised conveyors are perfect for a material feed that is at right angles to another conveyor. The parts will settle out on the conveyor rather than pushing each other off. It also works with the larger conveyors on to lower conveyors so if you don't have room for that big down conveyor use gravity. I thought it was possible to have a 1m gap between a tall conveyor and a short one but i was wrong. I'm sorry if anyone tried it and it didn't work.

• It is possible to overload the end of line boxing machine to the point finished goods pop out without being boxed and just disappear at the bottom of the ramp but aren't counted into inventory. Also the end of line ramp can be fed from every side not just the one side with the arrows so you can get up to multiple boxing machines bumped up to that ramp. You may have to use those inclined 2m conveyors so your boxes don't bulldoze each other off the ramp.
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  • Do you want to stop producing on a particular line in the plant but don't like clicking on all of the machines in the line control stations? Try putting all of your dispensers in a single line control station. The machines will still be using power but you can quickly drain a line of parts by shutting off all of the dispensers, make sure to name the dispensers so you can quickly identify which ones to turn off. I also moved the line control station/s with dispensers slightly away from the others by a few meters to make them easy to spot at a glance.

• If you can push machines right up to each other and line up the feed point on one with the exit point on the other you don't need a conveyor in between the machines. This will save you a ton of space and costs if you eliminate unnecessary conveyors. Try it on your camo-pants line.

• 2/3 split, you can use a 3 way splitter to achieve a 2/3 split if you direct one output channel on to one of the other output conveyors. This is handy if you are feeding a common component like plastic fittings or gun components from a dedicated production cell to 2 lines that have different requirements for components.

• Waterfall effect, you can let parts drop from over head over a 1/2m gap, it won't work at 1m i tried, it's a cool effect and it may allow you to make that connection for material feeds that is driving you a bit mad. There really wasn't any spillage when I did it, and it looks cool with really high volume parts like gun components.

• Use shift+click to be sure you have the minimum craft time set. Using only the red down arrow does not always set the minimum craft time. Thanks to Daddy_de_Chef on game Discord for the tip.

• Market order rules: When you set up a market order pay close attention to the rule that you set up. If you set up a buy order to purchase when stock reaches a certain number like 100, it will only activate on the exact number. Set your market orders for equal to or less than so the order activates properly regardless if you have 100 or 99.

• WHY CAN'T I TUNE THIS THING RIGHT?! Trying to tune a full production line can be very frustrating. Differing cycle times in different parts of the line can have you fiddling with 1/10's of seconds for quite a while. Are you trying to do everything on a single line or do you have production cells? Sometimes it's a lot easier to make a common component in a stand alone cell.

• Intermediate parts are a good way to produce certain items "offline". But before you build anything you need to do a little manufacturing math.

• So let's open that inventory and take a look at say plastic fittings. Minimum craft time is 1.0 second to make 5 fittings and the output is 0.3 seconds per or 1.5 seconds for all 5 fittings made so let's round that up to 3 seconds and 10 fittings and call that our cycle.

• The recycle bin has a $3 maintenance cost!! I'm calling an outside accounting firm to go over the books here, Is this part of the henchmen update!? I'm just kidding, but it is about $2 too much for bin maintenance. A 1m conveyor has $3 maintenance and 2 electric cost. I point this out because if you need to use more than just a few 1m or 2m conveyors to move parts to the next operation, you should consider using a dispenser and running into a recycle bin.

• So we can output a 3 second cycle of 10 parts x 20 total cycles of parts in one minute 20 x 10 = 200. A medium size clothing factory can easily consume over 900 fittings per minute so I would need to have 5 machines producing fittings to match consumption. Also setting up plastic fitting production according to the cookbook while correct isn't economic at volume.

• Here is the sticker though. The boxing machines max output speed is one box every 2 seconds or 30 per minute and each box holds 20 which is 600 fittings boxed per minute. It can't output any faster and boxes will just stack up in the machine waiting. But now you see the issue i need a second boxing machine and splitter to feed them to keep up with the 900+ fittings per minute. But boxing is for shipping not consumption and the game doesn't spell this out.

Just use recycle bins. That's right folks everything that is going in to a recycle bin sits in inventory but you must use a dispenser to feed it in at the correct point somewhere. So if you have something like plastic fittings or gun components you can just empty the output into recycle bins in the plant and then set up dispensers where necessary.
This allows for you to really scale up volume in the same plant if you plan carefully as there are no boxing machines and end of line ramps needed to get the material to inventory for use.

• This is a off-line production cell, by using this I eliminate a lot of utility heat usage and maintenance costs. Whenever you want to make a production cell like this you need to consider consumption of the parts. This set up is only cost effective if this set up has less cost than separate feed points in the line. Two plastic fittings feeds for 2 individual glove lines is definitely cheaper than a full plastic fitting production cell but when you are running a full clothing factory this is the best option for plastic fittings and boot soles.

• Flash grenade production, by using very small cells in this way I have very small footprints for the production lines. This really helps me in scaling up production. Dedicated cells for high volume parts running into recycle bins saves a lot of square footage, conveyors, and boxing machines.

• By breaking frag grenade production into two parts I'm able to easily tinker with volume production. Explosive production is still outpacing my hammer forge should I slow down explosive production? Nah, I can easily break up the left hand cell to try to add some volume.

• Of Course you have to set up dispensers to feed the boxing machines, but in a lot of ways this is easier than fitting boxing machines and end of line ramps in tight spaces. Don't forget boxing machines can output one box of twenty items every two seconds and no faster. You may have to use some 2m inclined conveyors depending on how many boxing machines you bump up to the ramp.

This section will change as updates in game are made.

• Now we have some hired help to do our dirty work and as the devs pointed out this is a bit of a dark turn but, if you look for it, it also brought a bit of a Monty Python comedic undertone. It seems once promoted my henchmen has decided that the solution of everything is to shoot one of the other employees. It really has a dark comedy theme there. "You're late for work!" BANG!, "Stop skulking about!" BANG!, "I don't trust that guy!" BANG!, "He's Lazy!" Bang. And then if I spare the employee, that employee proceeds to chew out the guy holding the shotgun, I was waiting for my henchmen to shoot him anyway.

• Henchmen need their own little place to hang out and be henchmen, fortunately the construction update allows you to expand the footprint of your original factory a lot. I think there may be 3-4 times the available floor space on the lot.

• I rebuilt the break room for the henchmen inside the back of the machinery room, because you know. "BANG!"

• All of your potential clients can now pay you in cash, diamonds, drugs, or gold. When you open the menu you see all the goods you have stored click the "laundering" tab and you can select which henchmen you want and what goods you want laundered for clean cash.

• There isn't a lot for henchmen to do at the moment except wait to be told to launder goods or shoot people they don't like in the plant. However, the update does open up the potential for a lot of factually based game play. Laundering these types of goods for weapons sales is by its very nature a multi step process. Opening import /export fronts for clothing and other legitimate sales as cover for moving the illegal weapons. Adding document forgery and bribery and intelligence gathering to the tech tree could be supporting skills.

The material splitters are really nice IF you use them correctly.

• Single components obviously have no issue with either system. The issue you will have is when you try to run different components in splitters.

• If you try to put just two components through a 2-way splitter and your components are arriving at the same speed, one will go right and one will go left and you will only succeed in accumulating parts in the machines with very few complete parts getting through.

• So single components can use 2 or 3 way splits, two components should be fed into a 3 way split to prevent accumulating parts in machines, and 3 components should use a 2 way split for the same reason. Now if the components are arriving at much different speeds or volume it may work but it tends to work ugly.

• Of course none of that matters if you are just sending completed products to a boxing machine cell for sale.

My neglected and long overdue addition of "blueprints" and how to scale up production.

Sorry I've fallen behind I will get this done soon.